Great Issues in Humanities

131H     CRN 6512                                              

10:10am – Noon  

Tuesday & Thursday

Dr. Gene Cline

We focus on discourse about crucial value issues, including the meaning of life, our framing of life-and-death decisions (Who should live and who should die? Who decides? How should we talk about it?), how we talk about the “ultimate” value of human life in a world of finite resources that mandates trade-offs, whether it is better to develop a logic of comparison for answering value questions or whether it is better to insure that our values and actions simply “fit” our reflectively acceptable lives, and the like.  Students are encouraged to develop their own philosophy of valuation, comparison, or action on topics of our mutual choosing. The professor is expected to be open to related topics from each student’s areas of interest.

Evaluation: A series of short papers (around three) and a final research paper.

Readings: Selected articles along with Ruth Chang’s Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason, Isaiah Berlins’ The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Benjamin’s Meaning in this Finite World of Human Lives, Voltaire’s Candide, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich,  Camus’ The Plague.